See also Book Two: Finding The Victim.The body Identified as Adam Walsh is not him. Could Adam still be alive?

NOW AVAILABLE: A SPECIALLY-PRICED BOX SET EDITION OF BOOKS ONE AND TWO More

The disappearance of Adam Walsh, a six-year-old last seen at a shopping mall in Hollywood, Florida, in July 1981 was about the worst nightmare imaginable. Two weeks later, the remains of a child’s head were found and identified as Adam. No one has ever been arrested for the crime. For the most part, the case’s narration has been told by the victims and local law enforcement. However, there has been another voice, an independent investigative journalist and author of five True Crime books about Florida, Arthur Jay Harris, who has continued to write about it for two decades. The deeply-researched story he tells, since corroborated by multiple forensic experts and a significant finding from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, disputes almost everything that everyone in the public has been led to believe. In Book One, Harris builds a case that the taker of Adam was the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. In Book Two, Harris shows that the child who was found and identified as Adam is very unlikely to be him—and much more likely, as crazy and hopeful as it sounds, Adam is alive. Harris interviewed eight credible witnesses who identified Dahmer as the man they saw at the mall with or near Adam when he was taken, and reported his findings on ABC Primetime, Anderson Cooper, Nancy Grace, and in The Miami Herald. But then Hollywood Police declared at a press conference that a suspect they’d investigated and dismissed 25 years earlier was Adam’s killer, after all. That was Ottis Toole, who John Walsh had long said he believed was his son’s killer. Was there new evidence? No, said the police chief. There could never be a trial. Toole had died more than ten years earlier, in custody, as had Dahmer. Yet prosecutors might never have been able to prove that the murdered child was Adam. Although there was an autopsy, there was no autopsy report—or autopsy photos. Also missing were Adam’s dental records and a forensic dental report, considering that the positive ID was based strictly on a match of teeth. In a letter of finding, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement confirmed that all of those documents are not in the files. The positive ID was made by a dental chart match of one filling. But that’s only enough for a presumptive ID, said forensic dentists and medical examiners who Harris consulted. And the filling was in a common place for children. Also, a family friend of the Walshes viewed the remains and made a visual ID. (The Walshes at the time were out of town and sent their friend.) But as John Walsh wrote in his book, the friend did not at first recognize the child. Only when its mouth was opened did he see “a small, emerging tooth” which he said matched when Adam had smiled at him, days before he disappeared. Adam’s last photo, taken a month before he disappeared, showed clearly that he had neither top front tooth—the same as when Adam’s best friend last saw him, a week or two before he disappeared. A police last-seen-alive description says that Adam’s top left front tooth was “partially grown in.” Apparently it had erupted between when he was last seen by his best friend and the Walsh family friend. When the remains were found, Adam was missing two weeks. The M.E. told the press that the child had been dead for possibly all that time. Teeth don’t keep growing after death. But the public record police crime scene pictures show the top left front tooth as a buck tooth, in “almost all the way,” said an anthropologist who examined the remains. Harris showed the photos and the evidence to forensic and pediatric dentists, who all said that children’s teeth don’t come in that fast. “No way in hell” the found child was Adam, one said. If it’s not Adam, who is it? And how about the Walshes, who dedicated their lives to his memory? Was the desperate search for Adam ended too early? Where, then, is Adam Walsh? Could he still be alive? A message Harris got on Facebook is the reason he came to ask those questions…

True crime writers primarily pursue the question "Why?" Why did somebody commit the crime? How could he get away with it for so long?

In my true crime books, I pursue a different primary question: about the case's outcome, I ask, "Are you sure?"

Every true crime story has loose ends that naggingly just don't fit into the constructed narrative. They make for a challenge: stay with your narrative and ignore or play them down, or follow them and risk your narrative.

There is an essential messiness to true crime that a reader of it must both resist and embrace. But that's why we read it, right? If you want everything well-tied up at the end, read crime fiction. To start, give up on the idea that a story must have a bottom. How can there not be a bottom? Yes, theoretically there is a bottom, but to us on the outside looking in, it's just not accessible. In reality, what we think are story bottoms are really false bottoms; beneath them, if we dare to look, are more bottoms. That wisdom, I should add, did not come to me easily. My stories are always less about the crimes themselves than my endurance to stay on the rollercoaster rides to find the truth. Countless times I'm upended, and I never see it coming.

Yet the job of a guide, narrator and investigator, such as myself, remains to organize that mess. However, I also scrutinize the work of the other guides, narrators, and investigators on the story. When I approach a story, I look for, then follow, significant pathways not taken: people who law enforcement couldn't get or weren't then ready to talk; witnesses who weren't asked everything important; and things the authorities were blind to or simply missed.

Then there are the stories in which the official investigators suppressed facts. On those, I am unrelenting in pursuing public records (always politely, politeness is essential in all information gathering). In obscure files and from additional reporting based on them, I've discovered a few rare things that were never known outside of law enforcement.

Always remember that to some extent, every interested party in a crime story is intentionally misleading us. They tell mostly true things but withhold or lie about other facts that are contrary to their interests. Trust only the people with no skin in the game not to intentionally mislead.

In each of my books, I first bring you up to speed by composing the story from what's on the record, then I make a narrative switch to first person and have you follow my investigation. When I pick up the right trail, it becomes obvious. I always advance my stories, including Speed Kills and Until Proven Innocent, but the two books in which I made the most significant (and contrarian) contributions are Jeffrey Dahmer's Dirty Secret: The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh, and Flowers for Mrs. Luskin.

And now, because it seems obligatory in such biographical summaries, among the television shows I have appeared on with my stories include: ABC Primetime; Anderson Cooper 360; Nancy Grace; Ashleigh Banfield; The Lineup; Inside Edition; Catherine Crier; Snapped; City Confidential; Cold Blood; and Prison Diaries.